Almost every industry in the world has benefited from the invention of plastics, but it is only in the recent past that they have begun to be appreciated as architectural materials in their own right. . . .

In the 1920s, the urban theory of Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885–1967) redefined architecture’s relationship to the city. His proposal for a high-rise city, where leisure, labor and circulation would be vertically integrated, both frightened his contemporaries and offered a trenchant critique of the dynamics of the capitalist metropolis. Hilberseimer’s Groszstadtarchitektur is presented here for the first time in English translation. . . .